United States Military Academy at West Point

From Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia

The United States Military Academy, also known as West Point, was formed by Thomas Jefferson in 1802.

On January 1821, Professor Jared Mansfield wrote to Thomas Jefferson from West Point:

“The Superintendent, Officers, Professors, Instructors, & Cadets of the United States Military Academy, impressed, with a high sense of the great services, you have rendered the Nation, & that this Institution, with which they are connected, originated under your patronage, & presidency, are anxious for some special, & appropriate memorial of your person, which may descend to posterity.”[1]

Sully portrait. United States Military Academy

The library at the U.S. Military Academy, Mansfield informed Jefferson, had portraits of George Washington and of Jonathan Williams, the academy’s first superintendent. Would Jefferson, Mansfield asked, “gratify them” by sitting for Thomas Sully, one of the “best Portrait Painters of our Country,” at Monticello?

By 1802, when President Jefferson established the United States Military Academy, he had fully embraced the importance of “useful sciences” in education and in the protection of the young nation. Two years earlier, Jefferson had written to Pierre S. du Pont de Nemours, asking: “What are the branches of science which in the present state of man, and particularly with us, should be introduced into an academy?” DuPont proposed an all inclusive plan of national education with primary schools, colleges, and four specialty schools – medicine, mines, social science and legislation, and “higher geometry and the sciences that it explains.” With engineering “urging forward the other sciences,” this school would be of the greatest benefit to the nation, du Pont explained. As he told Jefferson: “No nation is in such need of canals as the United States, and most of their ports have no means of exterior defense.”

Just two months after Jefferson’s inauguration, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn announced that the president had “decided in favor of the immediate establishment of a military school at West Point and also on the appointment of Major Jonathan Williams” to direct “the necessary arrangements, at that place for the commencement of the school.”

On March 16, 1802, Jefferson affixed his name to the Military Peace Establishment Act, directing that a corps of engineers be established and “stationed at West Point in the state of New York, and shall constitute a Military Academy.” The academy’s sole function would be to train engineers, and Williams, grandnephew of Benjamin Franklin, was named superintendent. On July 4, 1802, the U.S. Military Academy formally opened for instruction. “Our guiding star,” Superintendent Williams said, “is not a little mathematical School, but a great national establishment. … We must always have it in view that our Officers are to be men of Science, and as such will by their acquirements be entitled to the notice of learned societies.”

In the War of 1812, the enemy British did not capture any works constructed by a graduate of West Point, and perhaps, as historian Henry Adams suggested, “had an engineer been employed at Washington … the city would have been easily saved.”
Jefferson’s military academy, Adams wrote, had “doubled the capacity of the new little American army for resistance, and introduced and scientific character into American life.” Jefferson himself said that he “ever considered that establishment as of major importance to our country, and in whatever I could do for it, I viewed myself as performing a duty.” Today, the Thomas Sully portrait of Thomas Jefferson commissioned by the “Superintendent, Officers, Professors, Instructors, & Cadets of
the United States Military Academy” hangs at West Point.

--Christine Coalwell, 2001; Revised by Bryan Craig, March, 2007.

Footnotes

Before the commandant stood a worried cadet,
unjustly accused of disregarding orders
and disparaging the memories of Thomas Jefferson
and John Adams. Both men had died
on July 4, 1826-exactly fifty years after the
ratification of the Declaration of Independence,
which Jefferson drafted and Adams championed,
and exactly twenty-four years after the
official commencement of operations at the
United States Military Academy, which Jefferson
established and Adams supported. When
officers at West Point heard the startling
news-a coincidence that young mathematicians
at Jefferson's other school, the University
of Virginia, would calculate the odds against
to be more than 1.7 billion to one-they decided
that the academy should pay its respects. The
cadet, as sergeant of the guard, had been directed
to see to it that his peers fire two guns,
from reveille to retreat, in quick succession
every fifteen minutes. Instead of the regular
issue of two clear shots, however, Major William
J. Worth, the commandant, had heard
haphazard gunfire. "Shortly after morning parade
I was sent for in great haste by the Commandant," the cadet later remembered. I denied
disobeying the order, and insisted that the
guns were discharged at proper intervals."
Worth dismissed the cadet who, "to avoid any
further trouble . . . loaded and touched them
off myself, watch in hand." Yet "again I was
sent for, and rated soundly for failure. What
it all meant I could not understaud, but the
Major went with me to the guard-tent, and
just as I touched off the gun, before its echoes
died away," another shot thundered in the distance.
"The cause," he then realized, "was the
blasting of rocks" around nearby Fort Putnam,
which Worth "had heard, but which I had not."
Worth "apologized before the whole guard for
his unjust censure," ordered an end to the blasting,
and the tribute to Jefferson and Adams
continued. Such a demonstration of solicitude
for Jefferson's memory would not again occur
at West Point for nearly a century.

Jefferson wrote not only the Declaration of
Independence but also the Virginia Statute for
Religious Freedom and his 1787 Notes on the
State of Virginia. He served in colonial Virginia's
House of Burgesses, the Continental
Congress, and the Virginia House of Delegates;
he was his state's governor and his nation's
minister to France, Secretary of State, Vice
President, and President. He was a noted architect,
spirited violinist, ardent farmer, and a
leading scientist. He knew seven languages,
doubled the nation's territory through the Louisiana Purchase, dispatched Lewis and
Clark on their voyage of discovery, introduced
pasta and ice cream to the American palate,
and fathered the University of Virginia. He
was, in short, a true polymath, a Renaissance
man whose interests spanned wide and probed
deep.

Among his many accomplishments, however,
Jefferson's 1802 founding of the United States
Military Academy is, and has been, often overlooked.
Such was not the case in the early years
of West Point - as the incident between Worth
and the cadet makes clear. Jefferson was held
up as the academy's founder, patron, and creator. His name was recognized aud his memory was perpetuated. Beginning in the 1830s,
however, new considerations made a connection
with Jefferson seem less attractive to the Army
officers at West Point. At the centennial celebrations of the academy's birth, it was not
Jefferson but George Washington who was
described as founder. Only in the past half century,
in fact, did Jefferson re-emerge. The new
question was not whether Jefferson had a role
in the creation of West Point-for certainly, he
did-but what he did to foster the academy and
why, as he wrote in 1821, he considered it "of
major importance to our country."

Even so, the die had been cast. Jefferson had been divorced from West Point in the
minds of many of its graduates and the public.
Buildings had been named, statues erected, and a myth created that characterized as wasted
time the years prior to the installation of Sylvanus
Thayer as superintendent. The result
was neglect, on the part of some, and ignorance,
on the part of others, of Jefferson's contributions.

Despite lapses in historical memory, the fact
that the United States Military Academy owes
its existence to Jefferson is beyond refutation.
Plans for a national institution charged with
military education had been advanced since
the time of the American Revolution. Colonel
Henry Knox suggested it, treasury secretary
Alexander Hamilton supported it, French-
American Lieutenant Colonel Ann Louise de
Toussard drew up ambitious plans for it, and
Presidents George Washington and John
Adams asked Congress to establish it. But
their various proposals either languished or
amounted to little until 1802, when President
Jefferson convinced Congress to authorize the
establishment of the military academy. It commenced
operations officially on July 4 of that
year, the twenty-sixth anniversary of American
independence.

The early academy was a small institution
with only a handful of faculty and cadets. Even
so, it received a good deal of attention from the
busy president, who corresponded with West
Point professors and Jonathan Williams, its first superintendent, served as honorary leader
of the United States Military Philosophical Society,
a West Point scientific organization and
booster group, and, in 1808, called for the
Academy's dramatic enlargement. On April 12
of that vear. Conmess heeded Jefferson's call and increased the authorized enrollment to 256 cadets. Although years elapsed before the Academy succeeded in its efforts to attract this number
of qualified students, the fact that Jefferson
supported an Academy of this size suggests
much about his commitment to the institution.
In the census of 1810, the federal government
counted 7.2 million Americans. As a percentage
of the population, the academy envisioned by
Jefferson was more than twice as large as today's
West Point, when each year about 4,000
cadets prepare for the defeuse of a nation of
about 281 million people.

His support did not go unnoticed. In 1821,
more than a decade after his retirement as commander-in-chief, mathematics professor Jared Mansfield wrote to Jefferson in behalf of Superintendent
Sylvanus Thayer, the faculty, and the
cadets. "Impressed with a high sense of the
great services you have rendered the nation,
and this institution, with which they are connected,
originated under your patronage, and
presidency," Mansfield informed Jefferson, they
were "anxious for some special, and appropriate
memorial of your person which may descend
to posterity. They have already in the Academy Library the portraits of the great Washington,
the Founder of Our Republic, and Col. (Jonathan)
Williams, the first chief of the Mil(itary)
Academy, and they wish to add yours to the
number, as being alike the Founders, and Patrons
of both." Jefferson agreed to stand for the
poitrait, which noted Philadelphia artist Thomas
Sully traveled to Monticello to sketch and
then paint in the spring of the following year.
Sully's 8 1/2' x 5 1/2 "Thomas Jefferson" depicts
the academy's founder on the verge of his
seventy-ninth birthday. Still vigorous in mind
and body, at 6'3" he towers over many of his
contemporaries and stands, like the column beside
him, as an enduring pillar of strength. He
wears a black coat, knee breaches, and the furlined
bear skin topcoat given to him in 1798 by
Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish officer whose
Continental Army service during the War for
Independence included a tour of duty constructing
fortifications at West Point. In his left hand
Jefferson holds a parchment scroll-perhaps
his I802 law establishing the United States
Military Academy. Sully's portrait, the prize
of a collection that has hung for nearly two
centuries in buildings that have housed the
Cadet Library, would be the first and last major monument at West Point to the man to whom the military academy owes its existence.

What explains ignorance of Jefferson's role
in the years leading up to the Civil War? The
reasons are both political and personal. What
first must be understood is the devotion of West Point officers to Superintendent Thayer-to
him, to his superintendency, and to its significance.
Thayer's reign as West Point's chief was
successful and long, but both his arrival and
departure were clouded in controversy. The
turbulent 1817 transfer of power from Alden
Partridge to Thayer-so turbulent, in fact, that
for a while Partridge refused to step aside perhaps
has led chroniclers of West Point's past
to depreciate the contributions of Partridge and
his predecessors in order to underscore the legitimacy
of Thayer's appointment and the contributions
of his tenure. Thayer's 1833 resignation,
after a conflict with President Andrew
Jackson, also may have had a negative impact
as Jefferson's fame as founder. Like Thayer,
many antebellum West Pointers, including the
ones who wrote the academy's history, found
themselves at odds with Jackson's party and
allied themselves with its Whig opponents.
They had little reason to exalt the political
symbols of Jacksonian Democrats, the most
prominent of which was Thomas Jefferson.

Democrats appropriated Jefferson despite
the fact that the party of Jackson was hardly
the party of Jefferson. Jefferson-and James
Madison also-disliked the hero of the Battle
of New Orleans. After an 1824 visit to Monticello, Daniel Webster reported that Jefferson
said that he felt "much alarmed at the prospect
of seeing General Jackson, president." Jackson
had "very little respect for laws or constitutions,"
Jefferson told Webster, and he impulsively
sacrificed means to ends. All things
considered, Jackson was "a dangerous man."
Nonetheless, in the minds of Jacksonian Democrats
and their Whig opponents, Jefferson and
Jackson were linked. According to historian
Merrill Peterson, "so tight was the association
of these three elements-the Jefferson symbol,
democracy, and the Democratic Party-that
one scarcely existed in the public mind apart
from tlie others and attempts to disengage them
met with fleeting success."

Thayer's dispute with Jackson must be understood
in this context. When, in 1833, New
York Cadet H. Ariel Norris planted in the middle
of the parade ground a "hickory pole," he
took a stand not only for Jackson-widely
known as "Old Hickory" - but also for Jefferson
and the American revolutionary tradition,
which had used liberty poles to protest the
British imperial regime. He also had taken a
stand against Thayer, whose disciplinary system
had been described as oppressive by Cadets
Nicholas P. Trist, Jefferson's future grandson-in-
law, and Andrew Jackson Donelson, Jackson's
nephew, both of whom entered West
Point in 1818, shortly after Thayer's installation
as superintendent. Thayer understood the impropriety of the existence of this symbol of
partisanship and insubordination on the parade
ground. He ordered the removal of the hickory
pole as well as the removal of Norris. Norris
appealed the decision, so Thayer sent a faculty
member to Washington to explain the situation.
The professor met with Jackson to state his
case, but almost immediately Jackson "became
excited, and spoke of the 'tyranny' of Colonel
Thayer and, rising from his chair, he stalked
before me, swinging his arms as if in a rage
and speaking of the case of Norris. . . . Why.
said he, the autocrat of the Russias couldn't
exercise more power!'" The professor stood his
ground. Jackson dismissed him and ordered an
investigation of the system of discipline at
West Point. The resulting report recommended
no changes and, for three or four months, all
was quiet. But then another instance arose
where Jackson interfered with Thayer-Norris's
case had not been the first. Thayer, indignant,
resigned in 1833.

The principled departure of Thayer helped
to solidify his reputation as a hero of the academy.
It also helped to galvanize Army officers
in their opposition to Jacksonian Democrats. A
case in point is Dennis Hart Mahan, an 1824.
graduate of the academy who in 1830 returned
as engineering professor, a position he retained
for forty years. Mahan exhibited deep admiration
for Thayer and deep mistrust of Jacksonian
democracy, in part because of Thayer's battle with Jackson and subsequent resignation.
The episode so much distressed Mahan
that as soon as Jackson left office he hatched a
plan to restore Thayer as superintendent. The
scheme failed and Thayer never returned, but
Mahan remained. He became one of the most
influential faculty members in the history of
the academy.

Like Mahan, Winfield Scott became involved
in Thayer's superintendency. As a major
general he presided over the 1817 court
martial that found Partridge guilty of disobedience
and mutiny for refusing to vacate his West
Point post; he also presided over the academy's
1831 Board of Visitors, which, among other
measures, called on the government to give
Thayer a raise. Although not an academy
graduate, he became a consummate academy
insider; he spent summers at West Point and,
when he finally died in 1866, was buried there.
His political leanings mirrored those of Mahan
and many others connected with the Army. He
grew to despise Jackson, with whom he had a
series of disputes, and by 1852, after triumphant
leadership in the Mexican War, became
so advanced in his partisanship that he stood
as the Whig presidential candidate. Early in
life, Scott considered himself an ardent Republican;
Jefferson, in fact, interviewed him and
awarded his Army commission. But then he
developed a friendship with Federalist writer
Washington Irving, an admiration for Hamilton, and a highly critical understanding of
Jefferson. The third president was not only
"highly ambitious," Scott later wrote, but also
highly resentful, for "in the presence of Washington"
he recoiled from a "painful sense of
inferiority." While Washington had donned a
uniform in the fight for independence, Jefferson
had not, a fact that Scott believed led him
to oppose Revolutionary War veteran Hamilton's
plans for national finance, resign his cabinet
post, and embrace states' rights principles
that yielded the "first fruits" of the secessionist,
rebellious impulses that led to the Civil War.

Robert E. Lee, the academy's eighth superintendent,
did not share Scott's nationalism.
But Lee, who was born a Federalist and matured
as a Whig, did share Scott's hatred for
Jefferson. The feud between Jefferson and the
Lees dated all the way back to 1809, when
General Henry ("Light-Horse Harry") Lee
landed in debtor's prison as a result of business
dealings gone bad. Lee, who blamed his financial
condition on Jefferson's embargo of foreign
trade, spent much of his prison term putting
together his Memoirs of the War in the Southern
Department of the United States, which he
published in 1812. The Memoirs made Jefferson's
supposed "timidity and impotence" as
Revolutionary War governor of Virginia a case
study in the supposed need for energetic government
by officials with coercive authority.
Jefferson did not respond publicly to Henry Lee's assertions, but in private he derided the
tract as "a tissue of errors from beginning to
end," a "parody" based on "rumors," and a book
so "ridiculous that it is almost ridiculous seriously
to notice it."

There the matter rested-and the feud persisted-
until 1826, when a younger Henry Lee,
who had inherited not only his father's name
but also the rights to his book, prepared a revision
of the Memoirs. He recelved an invitation
by Jefferson to visit him at Monticello and
examine documents relating to his performance
as governor. Robert Lee's brother accepted the
offer, but when he arrived at Monticello in June
he found Jefferson on his deathbed. "There he
was extended," he remembered, "feeble, prostrate;
but the fine and clear expression of his
countenance not at all obscured. At the first
glance he recognized me, and his hand and
voice at once saluted me. The energy of his
grasp, and the spirit of his conversation, were
such as to make me hope he would yet rally and
that the superiority of mind over matter. . .
would preserve him yet longer." Jefferson never
recovered, however, and Lee never did see his
papers. But he departed with a changed heart.
When he revised his father's Memoirs he not
only softened the most damning passages but
also reprinted a letter that Jefferson had written
to him. After British troops captured Richmond
in 1781, Jefferson recounted, he rode his horse through the countryside in pursuit of
recruits for the militia. The animal collapsed
beneath him, he said, so he walked with the
saddle on his shoulders to a nearby farm, where
he borrowed an unbroken colt and continued
the journey.

The detente between Jefferson and the Lees
did not last for long. Three years after Jefferson's
death, his grandson published a collection
of his correspondence that reopened old
wounds, for it included an 1815 letter to James
Monroe that disparaged Light-Horse Harry
Lee's Memoirs as "a historical novel for the
amusement of credulous and uninquisitive
readers." It also contained a 1796 note to
Washington in which Jefferson described Lee
as "an intriguer" and a "miserable tergiversator,
who ought indeed to have been of more
truth, or less trusted by his countrymen." For
Light-Horse Harry Lee's sons, including Robert,
the recent West Point graduate, these were
fighting words. The brothers, according to
Robert E. Lee biographer Douglas Southall
Freeman, "Became more confnmed in their opposition
to the party of Jefferson," which by
then meant the party of Jackson. Henry Lee
published in 1832 another printed attack on
Jefferson, and seven years later brother Charles
Carter Lee enlarged the work, heaping on to
Jefferson even more opprobrium. Not to be left
out, in 1869 Robert E. Lee, who had otherwise renounced all things bellicose, reissued the
Memoirs-a final shot in a family feud that had
lasted for more than half a century.

The Civil War gripped America not long
after the conclusion of Lee's superintendency,
and Lee was not the only officer to trade his
Army blues for the gray uniform of the Confederacy.
West Point graduate and Confederate
General P. G. T. Beauregard, who on April
12, 1861 ordered the shelling of Fort Sumter,
had been relieved as the academy's superintendent
only two and one-half months earlier.
Cadets from southern states that had already
seceded had been trickling out of West Point
for several months; now, however, the number
of resignations appeared more like a flood. By
May, only 21 of the 86 southern cadets remained.
The rest would join a Confederate officer
corps that eventually included 296 academy
graduates, 151 of whom, like Thomas J.
"Stonewall" Jackson, became the generals of
Confederate President Jefferson Davis, yet another
West Point alumnus.

Meanwhile, for most of the Civil War Alexander
Hamilton Bowman served as superintendent,
an unenviable position in no small part
because of the heavy criticism directed at West
Point. Secretary of War Simon Cameron submitted
to Congress a report that dwelled on the
"extraordinary treachery" of academy graduates, a symptom, he suggested, of "a radical
defect in the system of education itself." Other
northern critics, including many of Congress's
radical Republicans, also depicted West Point
as a nursery of secessionism. In addition, they
characterized the graduates who remained in
the Union army as too southern in their views
on slavery and emancipation, too theoretical in
their tactics, and too timid in their efforts to
engage the enemy. When, in December 1861,
Michigan Senator Zachariah Chandler called
for the closing of the academy, several of his
colleagues concurred.

Superintendent Bowman faced a crisis.
West Point's enemies aimed at its destruction,
many of his faculty (most in Union blue) had
marched south and the Corps of Cadets stood
depleted. Given this context, it is not surprising
that Jefferson's reputation as founder of the
military academy continued to slip from public
memory as Alexander Hamilton Bowman made
no effort to promote his institution through a
closer association with his namesake's nemesis.
Like the academy, Jefferson had also been described
as too southern, too theoretical, and
too timid. These criticisms, which originated
during his own lifetime (and Henry Lee was
not the first to levy them), still reverberated
during the Civil War years, when Jefferson's
reputation plummeted.

Although the embattled reputations of both
West Point and Jefferson during the Civil War
combined to discourage the resurrection of Jefferson's
image as its founder, the 1902 centennial
celebration of its founding provided a clear
opportunity to recognize the third president.
Yet the academy snubbed Jefferson on its birthday.
The massive two-volume Centennial of
the United States Militaiy Academy at West
Point, a collection of speeches, banquet toasts,
and histories marking the occasion, mentions
his name only twice. In an essay on the academy's
origins, Edward S. Holden, the West
Point librarian, called attention to Secretary of
State Jefferson's doubts, in 1793, about the
constitutionality of a national military school.
He did not, however, point toward Jefferson's
supprt for the Academy in 1802; instead, he
wrote that "by the act of Congress . . . the
Military Academy was instituted." He gave
Jefferson only a single positive nod, and that
came in the middle of a long list of benefactors.
Among them, he wrote, "two names stand preeminent-
Knox and Hamilton." During the
Revolution, Holden pointed out, Knox "was
the first proposer and the steady advocate of a
military school of the very type of our own.
To Hamilton the Academy and the Army owe
a well-considered plan for military education
that, in its main features, has sufficed for the
needs of the century just passed." Holden's
tepid recognition excepted, all celebrants of the centennial seem to have ignored Jefferson's support
for the early military academy. Many coutinued
to fix their attention on later years,
heralding Thayer as the academy's father, and
some, such as the author of the brief history
of the academy that soon began to appear in
Bugle Notes, the cadet handbook, concurred
with Holden's assertion that "its founder is
Washington." No one thought to mention that
Washington, in 1802, was dead.

Jefferson's banishment from the West Point
pantheon cannot be written off solely as confoimity
to what, by that time, was fairly well established
tradition. The centennial fixed the
date of the founding with precision. Jefferson
was president in 1802, and the bill supporting
the establishment of the academy came not
from Congress but from him. In all likelihood,
historians of the academy ignored Jefferson in
1902 for two other reasons. The first was a
body of scholarship on diplomacy that attached
Jefferson's defense policies; the second was the
fact that the chief proponents of this neo-Hamiltonian
assessment were influential men with
powerful West Point connections.

As in the Civil War, nearly all of Jefferson's
detractors considered themselves members of
the Republican Party; unlike the Civil War,
when a good number of West Pointers allied
themselves with Democrats, in 1902 the "big
stick" policy of President Theodore Roosevelt
won admiration, if not active political participation, from the majority of Army officers. Perhaps
the most prominent neo-Hamiltonian was
Roosevelt himself, a former Army officer, veteran
of the Spanish-American War, and prolific
author. Others included his secretary of war,
Elihu Root, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, son of
popular West Point Professor Dennis Hart
Mahan. Each, echoing the contentions of previous
generations, directed sharp criticisms toward Jefferson.

While Roosevelt praised "Hamilton's wonderful
genius." he portrayed Jefferson as a conniving, impractical, and self-deluding ideologue.
The third president was "unscrupulous,"
a "pacifist" who established a "tradition
of timid avoidance of all physical danger." "I
have always regarded Jefferson," Roosevelt affirmed
in 1915, as "one of the most mischievous
enemies of democracy, one of the very weakest
we have ever had in public life." The twenty sixth
president blamed Jefferson for the War
of 1812. Jefferson, he wrote, "was perhaps the
most incapable Executive that ever filled the
presidential chair."

The worst of Jefferson's defense measures,
Roosevelt thought, was his plan for "an enormous
force of very worthless gun-boats-a
scheme," he wrote, "whose wisdom was about
on a par with some of that statesman's political
and military theories." Roosevelt's blast at Jefferson's
proudest naval project-based on the
assumption that an American ocean-going navy, which could never match the strength
of Britain's, would draw the nation into an unwinnable
naval war and should he replaced by
small, agile, and economical defensive craft
piloted by citizen-sailors-was echoed by
that other prominent neo-Hamiltonian, Alfred
Thayer Mahan. Mahan's important book on
The Influence of Sea Power in History argued
for a large, formidable navy of large, formidable
ships. To correspondents, Mahan expressed
his disdain for Jefferson and his "seductive
cheap gunboat policy, in which ensured
"a minimum of military usefulness at a maximum
of pecuniaty outlay."

Despite the efforts of neo-Hamiltonian detractors,
Jefferson's reputation among West
Pointers and citizens in general improved during
the next fifty years, thanks in no small part
to the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt. Unlike his
cousin, the younger Roosevelt cast himself as
a neo-Jeffersonian, sculpted Jefferson's image
as a political experimenter and advocate of liberty,..
and in 1943 dedicated the Jefferson Memorial.
Even before Roosevelt's campaign to renovate
Jefferson's image, however, West Point
fashioned a humble monument to his memory.
His name joined those of a handful of notables
inscribed onto the stone walls of the 1910 administration
and headquarters building. According to a pamphlet published shortly after
the building's completion, Jefferson deserved
recognition as the president "during whose administration
. . . the Military Academy was
founded." Thayer, described as "Father of the
Military Academy, and James Monroe, "under
whose administration the Military Academy
developed and was encouraged," were
similarly honored. (Washington received special
treatment, for his personal coat of arms
appeared high on the courtyard's east wall directly
across from the seal of the United
States.) Jefferson's inclusion within the headquarters
honor roll demonstrated that the willful
disregard for his contributions seen at the
centennial did not endure.

So did the naming in Jefferson's honor of
the avenue that linked the library with the
superintendent's quarters, noted on maps of the
academy beginning in the early 1930s, as well
as the East Academic Building's 1937 rededication
as Jefferson Hall. The honor was shortlived,
for a year later academy officials voted
to revert to the building's former name
because, they claimed, the new designation
"proved very confusing," could "lead to controversy
and dissention," and seemed out of
step with the generally established practice of
naming edifices not for men but for their functions.
(Later the academy again renamed the
structure, this time in memory of William
Bartlett, a long-serving science professor.) During this decade streets were named also
after Washington and Thayer, and a few years
earlier workmen completed Washington Hall,
the building containing the cadet mess, and the
Hotel Thayer. Both men retained their more
exalted status (and their eponymous buildings),
but Jefferson-especially during the
Franklin Roosevelt era-at least made inroads.

Thus by the time of the academy's 150th
birthday Jefferson had regained some of his
stature, not only among Americans generally
but also within the Army. The 1950 annonncement
of upcoming sesquicentennial exercises
by the superintendent, Major General Bryant
E. Moore, noted that "Thomas Jefferson, following
the advice of George Washington, John
Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and others, established
a national military academy on the Hudson
River at West Point." Two years later,
Superintendent Frederick A. Irving remarked
at the sesquicentennial invocation that "Jefferson
signed the act of Congress which established
this institution" because he joined with
Hamilton, Knox, and Adams in "realizing the
need for a trained source of officers, a corps
which would form the nucleus about which a
civilian army could be built." As part of its
birthday celebration, the academy published an
official account marking the occasion. The first
chapter, a brief synopsis of West Point's history,
began by quoting Jefferson's Military
Peace Establishment Act and mentioning that he "signed this legislation on March 16, 1802."

Although the recognition accorded to Jefferson
marked a departure from centennial
speakers' willful ignorance of his role, its tepid
nature still left plenty of room for qualification.
The official sesquicentennial history, for example,
took care to mention that "the Military
Academy did not spring into existence with a
stroke of the pen. The Act of 1802 simply
granted formal recognition to an institution
that had been slowly evolving since the first
American garrison occupied West Point during
the Revolutionary War." Jefferson's advocacy
constituted only "the final step" before Thayer's
"first step," which was "to reorganize the Corps
of Cadets." Once again, West Pointers pressed
Jefferson into the humble and virtually thankless
role of successor. Contrary to chronology,
they lavished the role of the academy's origlnator
and progenitor on Thayer.

The relatively newfound ability of West
Point officials to enunciate Jefferson's name
failed not only to alter the basic tenor of public
commemorations of the academy's birth but
also the substance. The major events of the sesquicentennial
included the installation in the
Cadet Library of a portrait of Confederate General
Robert E. Lee-Jefferson's old adversary and
on March 16 the laying of wreaths by delegations
of cadets at the graves of Thayer and
Washington. The cadet contingent at Mount
Vernon had no corollary at Monticello.

Jefferson received less recognition from actual
cadets than he did from actors who played
ones in Warner Brothers' The West Point
Story, a 1950 film starring James Cagney, Virginia
Mayo, Doris Day, and Gordon MacRea,
who appeared as Cadet Tom Fletcher, a talented
singer starring in the academy's annual
"100th Night" variety show. Although not an
official component of the sesquicentennial celebration,
the film focused on the school's origins
when, in the opening number of the fictionalized
cadet production, Fletcher took the stage
and stood before a chorus of classmates. "In
the beginning as in all things it was only a
dream" and he said, "but the dreamers had names:
like Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson. They
stood on a point of land on the west bank of the
Hudson and planned that this fortress that
guarded our newborn nation, should become
our military academy." In Hollywood's version
of history, however, Washington also trumped
Jefferson. "The Corps was founded," Fletcher
continued, "and the father of our country hecame
the father of a legend."

Despite these snubs, the highlight of the sesquicentennial-
the May 20 address by President
Harry S. Truman-gave to Jefferson more
attention than he had received at West Point
since the 1820s. Truman's speech recognized
Jefferson as founder of the academy; it also
praised his pragmatism and practicality. Yet so
did nearly concurrent statements by Dwight Eisenhower, Truman's triumphant European theater
World War II commander and Republican
successor, who said that he admired Jefferson
because "he understood and feared the
implications of the shift we have seen in recent
years from local government to Federal government,
from freedom to regimentation, from decentralization
to centralization."

Civilian leaders continued to praise Jefferson
in the decades after the Second World War.
President John F. Kennedy, for example, described
his predecessor as his "hero," one of the
"most exceptional men of the 18th century,"
and one of "our nation's . . . first great scholars."
He said at a banquet honoring Nobel
Prize winners from North and South America
that "this is the most extraordinary collection
of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever
been gathered together at the White House,
with the possible exception of when Thomas
Jefferson dined alone." Robert F. Kennedy
spotlighted the third president as a man who
welcomed the free "exchange of views" between
individuals, nations, and cultures.

While Democrats extolled Jefferson as an
intellectual, Republicans embraced his ideology.
Like Eisenhower and MacArthur before
him, Barry Goldwater, the 1964. Republican
presidential candidate, claimed Jefferson's
mantle. He charged that the Democratic Party
was "no longer the party of Jefferson" for it no
longer subscribed to "principle and principled liberalism." That the Arizona senator described
Jefferson as his favorite president is not surprising.
Under his leadership the Cold War
Republican Party renewed its commitment,
through both foreign and domestic policy, to
oppose big government and defend individual
freedom. Jefferson, who Franklin Roosevelt
had enlisted as a symbol of democracy and
egalitarianism to combat Nazis and Republicans,
now helped Republicans battle Communists
and Democrats. Even Democrat Jimmy
Carter admitted that Jeffersonian principles,
which included the insistence that people "stop
looking to the federal government as a bottomless
cornucopia," no longer remained "popular
. . . with some members of my party."
Ronald Reagan, who said in his famous campaign
speech for Goldwater that Democratic
leaders were "taking the party of Jefferson . . .
down the road under the banners of Marx,
Lenin, and Stalin," in 1987 proclaimed from
the steps of the Jefferson Memorial the Republican
faith that "economic freedoms" and the
political freedoms advocated by Jefferson were
"inextricably linked."

The Republicanization of Jefferson's image-
the emphasis on his support for limited
government at home and the expansion of liberty
abroad-resonated well within a Cold War
context. It also fit perfectly the central themes
of the Reagan administration, during which
the bulk of the current officer corps came of age and began to undermine the old ideal of an
a political military. Although during the 1970s
more than half of up-and-coming officers described
their politics as independent of any
specific party, today (2002) only 28 percent make such
a claim. Even more striking, those who identify
themselves as Republicans constitute 64 percent,
a figure eight times larger than the number
who call themselves Democrats. While this
phenomenon bodes ill for an all-volunteer military
struggling to avoid estrangement from the
public it defends, it probably constitutes good
news for Jefferson's reputation within the
Army, which for much of its existence was led
by men who identified the third president with
a party that many of them opposed. It also supgests
that occasions such as the 2001 Senate
confirmation hearing of retired General Colin
Powell, Republican President George W.
Bush's nominee for secretary of state, may well
become more common. Powell, who during the
Persian Gulf War commanded all of America's
armed forces, described Jefferson as "ahead of
the time in which he lived" and himself "as Jefferson's
admiring successor."

These political changes bode well for Jefferson's
image as the founder of the military academy.
Both parties find reasons to embrace Jefferson's
ideals. The military can now focus
attention on Jefferson without offending most
members of the public it serves. Witness the recent
announcement that West Point's new library
building, to be built in 2006, will be
named Thomas Jefferson Hall. The scholarly
environment has also changed. A year ago
West Point convened a bicentennial conference
on Jefferson's establishment of the academy; it
featured presentations by nearly a dozen scholars,
all of whom shed new light on his contributions
to the military school.

How will Jefferson's reputation as the academy's
founder fare in the future? What can
be predicted with certainty is that West Point's
view of its past will reflect its changing present.
The question will continue to be what really
it always has been: not whether Jefferson made
West Point, but what West Point makes of
Jefferson.